What does a piercing do in Minecraft? Explained

The crossbow is a fairly overlooked weapon most of the time in Minecraft. Players usually stick to swords and bows and rarely try crossbows or tridents. Well, this little item can be very dangerous, especially if you upgrade it with the best Minecraft enchantments. Therefore, in this guide, we will talk about one of them, the Penetration enchantment. This can be quite powerful and must be applied to get certain advancements. With that said, let’s take a look at how piercings work in Minecraft.

What is a piercing enchantment in Minecraft

Earrings are enchantments that can be attached to crossbows. Its special ability is to allow any type of arrow to penetrate multiple entities or mobs. The number of piercings is equal to the number of levels of this enchantment.

piercing enchantment professional

If I have a crossbow with a piercing that I applied, that means the arrow will hit an entity and go straight through it until it gets to the second entity, but it can’t go through there. Therefore, this level of penetration can damage two entities or mobs at once if they are standing parallel.

However, if you have Piercing IV, the maximum level of this enchantment, on your crossbow, your arrows can pierce 4 entities and damage 5 entities in total. All arrows fired from a penetrating crossbow can be recovered and used again and again.

This crossbow enchantment already gives you a considerable advantage against mobs, but it offers even more opportunities on Minecraft PvP servers. Piercing arrows completely ignore any shields the enemy is using to block your attacks, essentially rendering them useless.

Additionally, if you want to get two Minecraft advancements, you will need the Penetration enchantment. One of them is called “Two Birds, One Arrow” which means killing two phantoms with a stabbing arrow. The other is “Arbalistic”, a secret and challenging progression. To get it, you need to kill 5 different mobs with one stabbing arrow.

Disadvantages of piercing enchantment

Arrows can change direction when impaling a mob, so they only go in a straight line. This means that, as expected, stabbing is most effective when mobs are lined up.

Apart from that, piercing does not affect firework rockets used with crossbows . There is no way to impale multiple mobs with these dangerous projectiles. However, rocket fireworks already deal area damage, so they don’t need to penetrate.

Another important drawback of piercing is that it is not compatible with multi-shot enchantments. In survival mode, you cannot use a crossbow with both multishot and piercing.

So if you thought you could damage up to 15 mobs with one arrow, unfortunately that’s not possible as the power is too high. The same crossbow can quickly charge and pierce, allowing you to quickly shoot at approaching mobs.

How to apply a piercing enchantment in Minecraft

Earrings are one of the regular enchantments in the game, so you shouldn’t have any trouble getting them. Obtained from the enchantment table with a crossbow. This block also provides penetration, albeit at a lower level of enchantment, if there are no bookshelves around it.

Additionally, you can also purchase enchantment books with any level of penetration from the villagers in your Minecraft library. Like other enchanted books, you can obtain earrings from loot chests located in various structures in the game. Every building that offers a magical book contains the possibility of encountering a book with a piercing. Some of their structures are:

• abandoned mine
• ancient city
• desert temple
• Woodland Mansion

You can also find enchantment books while fishing in Minecraft. This provides another way to obtain penetration enchantments.

That’s everything you need to know about piercing enchantments. It’s relatively easy to obtain and use in-game, and mimics the penetration effects offered by many combat video games. That said, if you haven’t tried this cool and fun enchantment yet, you should definitely give it a try.